Google’s John Mueller answered a geotargeting and hreflang question in the Google Webmaster Help forums, a topic I always find fascinating for some reason. The question was “can I geo-target for one country while leaving an other country not geo-targeted to serve the rest of the world?”

John said, yes you can do that. John then explains the difference between geotargeting and using hreflang, which is also very interesting. John said that with geotargeting, Google will promote the localized version to the local version of that Google search. With hreflang, he added, there is no promotion or demotion but rather Google will swap out the URLs with the appropriate URLs for the country and language.

Here is what John said to that question:

Such an interesting topic. Why? Well, I’ve never done any implementation of geotargeting or hreflang. I really should one day…

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.